Bodybuilding

In the Resistance series, first shown at the Turkish Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale, Ali Kazma explores the interventions and strategies that free the body from its limits and, at the same time, confine it in order to control it. Resistance explores the ways in which the body is shaped today by scientific, cultural and social means, and how, as the setting of an activity, it is reproduced again and again. In these works, the productive activity of the body is told as a creative force that acts upon the body itself: producer and product, the one who shapes and the one who is shaped, are here united in the materiality of the body. In other words, Resistance is an artistic enquiry into the struggle to break the social, cultural, physical and genetic codes of the human body in order to make it perfect, and into the processes through which the body transforms, or is transformed, into a vehicle of new symbols and meanings.